


Stars and Crossbones

by Isis



Category: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: Action/Adventure, Canon-Typical Violence, Crooked Kingdom Spoilers, F/F, Getting Together, IN SPACE!, Post-Crooked Kingdom, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-20 01:25:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13136238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Isis/pseuds/Isis
Summary: "It seems the safest thing to do, to have you aboard," said Inej. "After all, the first time I was on a ship with you, you saved my life. I'm counting on you to continue keeping me alive."





	Stars and Crossbones

**Author's Note:**

  * For [metonymy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/metonymy/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, Metonymy! I swear I was going to write you something totally canonical, but then I saw "space pirate AU" and I couldn't help myself.
> 
> Huge thanks to saiditallbefore for the extremely last-minute beta read.

The spaceport was crowded with merchants, pilots, hucksters, miners, and far too many blond Fjerdan warrior-priests for Nina's liking. Despite her forged passchip that proclaimed her a citizen of Kerch Station – thank the Saints for Kaz Brekker's contacts – there was something in their gaze that made her feel as though they could see straight through her Ketterdam clothes and hairstyle right to her Ravkan soul. They would see who she was – _what_ she was – and they would stride across the hard shiny floor of the concourse, people scattering nervously out of their path, and two of them would grasp her arms with grips as strong as iron, and they would drag her off to prison, just as Matthias had so long ago.

But Matthias was dead. She had done as she'd promised, brought his body back here to his family, and now she was going to leave Fjerda, and she was never, _ever_ , coming – 

A hand touched her arm, and she whirled and almost screamed. But it was a small hand, a light hand, and when she saw whose hand it was she felt giddy.

"Inej!" She hadn't seen Inej since she'd left on this grim mission, and the sight of her now was like a plate of warm waffles on a cold morning. They embraced, and she kissed Inej on both her dark cheeks. "Oh, you – how did you know I'd be here today?"

Inej grinned. She looked so alive, so real; so dark and warm among the icy blond Fjerdans. "Did you think I only knew how to hack the computers back on Kerch?" She blew on her fingertips in a gesture of pride. "Once a wraith, always a wraith. It was easy enough to find your tracks through the system – your passage to Fjerda, your rail tickets to Beringer, your itinerary – "

"Under a false name," said Nina.

"Which Kaz arranged."

"So you had inside information."

"Good information is always useful, no matter where it comes from." Inej took Nina's hand and began to walk down the concourse. 

Nina let herself be tugged along, bemused. "Then you know I'm booked on the _Elling Diamond_ , which is berthed on the upper ring. Which is in the other direction."

"You _were_ booked on the _Elling Diamond_. Now you're booked on the _Wraith_ , which is berthed," she said, taking a sharp left turn and slapping her free hand onto a touchpad, fingers punching in a security code faster than Nina could follow, "right here."

Specht was still the _Wraith_ 's pilot, though Nina didn't recognize any of the other crew. But they all stopped their various tasks and put their fingers to their hats when Inej walked through the ship, nodding at Nina with the respect due to a friend of the captain. Inej led them into a small, neat lounge with padded couches and a long window that would look out to space when they were underway, but now only showed the metal wall of the docking pod. After they had settled themselves, one of the crewmen brought tea and liqueur and a tray of pastries, then let himself out of the room and closed the door behind him.

"You must want something from me," said Nina, but she plucked an anise tart from the tray and took a bite, then another. "Oh, this is heaven. I don't think they've got proper food anywhere on this stupid frozen planet."

"Apparently not," said Inej. "We need to fatten you up again."

Nina felt her face flushing. "That's not what I meant," she mumbled, and reached for another tart to cover her embarrassment. Why was it suddenly so hard to talk to Inej? They'd been so easy together in Brekker's gang, the Dregs, back before the big score that had netted them the funds to get off Kerch Station. She'd saved Inej's life, and Inej had saved hers. It hadn't been that long ago. But now Inej had her ship, and her crusade against slavers like those who had first brought her to Kerch. And Nina – Nina had nothing, now that Matthias was gone.

"You should eat, too," said Nina. The tart was delicious, sharp and sweet. She wanted to eat six of them. How was it that Inej stayed so slender, with this kind of food on her ship? "So," she said, carefully. "Kaz sent you, did he."

Inej looked at her over the almond cookie she was nibbling. "I'm not his messenger. He doesn't send me anywhere."

"But you said he told you where I was."

"He gave me the name you were traveling under. Don't you know me well enough to believe I can do the rest on my own?" Inej leaned forward and clasped one of Nina's hands in hers. "I know where you went, and I know what you went there to do. But why don't you tell me about how it was?"

And with that, it was easy. Nina told her about the long, cold rail journey to the Helvar family estate, the lies she'd told his parents, leavened with just enough truth to make them believe. They'd mourned him, and she had, too. They'd buried their son, and they'd accepted her as Matthias's bereft lover, and never suspected that she was anything other than that.

"I'm sorry," said Inej, squeezing Nina's hand softly. "It must have been difficult for you."

"He is dead. I am not." Of course there was much more to it. They had been enemies for most of the time they'd known each other, and lovers for only a short while. He would remain in her heart forever, but she had done her mourning. "But what about you? You're here, on your ship, traveling among the stars, and Kaz is back on Kerch Station. You must miss him."

"It wouldn't make any difference if I were there." She shrugged. "We send messages back and forth. He's only slightly more remote than he was when we were in the same room."

Her voice held a sharpness that Nina had rarely heard from Inej, and it made her want to reach out and hug her against her bosom, give her the actual human contact she so clearly craved. She'd made her peace with Matthias's death. But Kaz was untouchable, unreachable, an AI construct based on the intelligence of a man who had lived and died hundreds of years ago. His holographic image, with dark hair and sharp cheekbones and old-fashioned clothing, had looked as real as any of the flesh-and-blood members of the gang, but if you forgot and laid your hand on his arm, it would drop right through empty space. Then he would turn his unfathomable eyes on you and you'd blush, and want to sink through the ground. 

Kaz and Inej had always had a special understanding, a closer relationship than existed between any of them, then. Had Kaz been human, it would have been natural to assume that they were lovers. Certainly it had always been obvious, at least to her, that Kaz cared about Inej deeply, or at least as much as an AI could care about anyone. It had been clear she was more important to him than anybody else in the gang, not only for her skills and abilities that complemented his so well, but for who she was. It had also been clear that Inej cared about Kaz. She probably still did.

It was difficult for Nina, whose lover was dead. But how much harder was it for Inej, whose lover had never been alive?

"Anyway," said Inej. "Did you really want to go to Weddle?"

"What?"

"According to the shipping records, the _Elling Diamond_ was going to Weddle. Do you want us to take you there?"

She hadn't even paid attention, really, when she'd bought her ticket. "Where is the _Wraith_ going? I mean, where would you be going if I wasn't here?"

"Across the N sector, probably, and then down towards the Zemeni system. We tend to patrol the space lanes where the slavers are, between the planets where they kidnap their human cargo and the ports where they think they can make a profit. Though on the way over here I intercepted some interesting packets. The merch council thinks there might still be a tiny bit of traffic in _jurda parem_ coming out of Shu Gamma. Not enough for them to send out the official interdiction fleet, but I was thinking it might be a worthwhile diversion."

"Worthwhile, how?" Nina leaned forward, eyes narrowed. What was left of the pastry fell from her fingers onto the china plate, scattering crumbs. Inej couldn't be thinking of selling it herself, could she? It went against everything she stood for, everything Nina thought she knew about her. 

"Worthwhile getting it out of circulation. Which means out the airlock."

Nina relaxed a fraction. Still, a small part of her schemed frantically: if they waylaid a ship carrying _jurda parem_ , could she somehow manage to get some for herself? Could she distract Inej's crew somehow, get to the hold? Would she finally be able to satisfy this endless craving, this empty space that yearned to be filled? _No_ , she told herself firmly. _Inej helped bring me back from the dead once, and she doesn't want to do it again. She'd kill me before she let me have any._

 _I_ hope _she would kill me before she let me have any._

Inej sat on the couch, her long limbs folded in what looked like impossible angles. She wasn't even looking at Nina, but instead regarded the tray as though the pastries on it were the most fascinating things in the room. 

Was this a test? Nina shook her head, trying to clear it. No, Inej was her friend. Her closest friend; maybe her only friend, now.

"You won't let me get near it," Nina said hopefully.

"Of course not." Inej smiled. "But I'll let you push the button to send it into space, if you want."

"Sold," said Nina. She exhaled the breath she'd been holding, and smiled. "So where do I sign up?"

* * *

She was assigned a tiny cabin of her own, which had been used to store spare parts and medical supplies, and once they were off-planet she spent the day cleaning it out and moving everything into its proper place. Jan, a burly crewman with Fjerdan coloring, told her that they'd had to move things around because their hold had been filled with frozen exotic fruits and vegetable extracts from Novi Zem. "They pay a lot for those things on Fjerda," he'd told her proudly, as though it had been his idea to transport them.

But it turned out that Inej, in addition to all her other talents which Nina had known about, also had a good head for business. "Kaz helps, of course. Tells me what they want where, and then I can figure out where to get it for the best price."

"He always was a canny businessman." 

"Well, he certainly demands his cut," said Inej, voice flat and hard. 

"I thought you were just a pirate. I didn't know you did legitimate trade, too."

"Well, we have to earn a living somehow. Feed the crew, pay dockage and port fees. You'd be surprised how easy it is to spend a million _kruge_."

"You know you could sell the _parem_ –"

"You know I could never sell _parem_ ," said Inej. "You know why I'm doing this."

Nina nodded. Inej intercepted slavers and took their poor human cargo to safety because she herself had been bought and sold. She knew what it was like to be stolen from one's home and one's family, to have one's identity stripped away, to become merely a toy and a tool, forced to perform at someone else's pleasure. She wanted to destroy the _jurda parem_ because she'd seen what had happened to Nina when she'd used it. Inej might have been one of Kerch's most wanted criminals, back when they both ran with the Dregs, but Nina would wager that she had a better developed sense of right and wrong than any merch on the station.

"Do you get to Kerch Station at all?" she asked curiously.

"Sometimes. Not often. Is that where you'd like us to take you?"

"Not yet! We haven't done any pirate things yet!"

Inej didn't laugh, but the corner of her mouth lifted and her eyes crinkled just a little. It looked good on her, thought Nina. Inej had always had too-old eyes gazing out of her young face, the consequences of her hard years in Tante Heleen's brothel and then her time with the Dregs, on the streets and in the shadows. "Well, it might be a while before we do pirate things. We picked up some things on Fjerda for delivery to Shu Epsilon, so we've got some real business in the system to attend to first. And that will give me time to track down the _parem_ dealers, so we can take them out at the source."

"All right," said Nina. "Tell me what non-pirate things you want me to do, and I'll do them. I want to be a part of the crew, not just a passenger."

Inej gave her a quick hug and a kiss on the cheek. "Just like old times. Better than old times. Come on up to the bridge with me and I'll get you started."

It was surprisingly interesting to see all the parts of a spaceship, its workings and machinery, the systems that propelled it through real-space and the ones that moved it through tide-space. Of course it wasn't Nina's first time on a ship, but her previous voyages had all been taken with an eye toward the destination, rather than the journey – at least, the ones she'd taken willingly. The bridge, with its one real window surrounded by screens showing various views around the outside and the interior, was fascinating to her, as was the course-plotting computer with its images of possible trajectories, and the bewildering array of wires and pipes that kept the onboard environment livable and comfortable.

When Inej got to the door of the engine room she gave Nina a quick glance before palming the door switch. For a moment Nina was puzzled – why had Inej looked so concerned? – but then, as they stepped inside and she saw the mechanical crew, she understood. Of course they were Grisha. You couldn't sail a tide-ship without a Tidemaker, and a Fabrikator would always be faster and more precise than an ordinary machinist.

"Well," she said brightly. "This is where it's done, hmm?"

The Tidemaker smiled, bright white teeth in copper-dark skin. She was a tall Zemeni who reminded Nina just a bit of Jesper, and that made her wonder for a moment how Jesper and Wylan were doing, back on Kerch Station. Maybe she should go back there, just to say hello. 

"This is for navigating tide-space, yes," said the Tidemaker. Her accent was as deep and rich as her skin. "We go to tide-space in fourteen hours."

"And we won't see much of Kiri until we leave it again, so I thought I should introduce you now," said Inej. "Our Durast here is Mikel, who I hope we will see a lot of, because that will mean that nothing's broken and needing his attention."

Mikel dipped his head. He looked even younger than Inej. "And you, you are Grisha also," he said in Ravkan. "I have heard your name."

"Then you also know," she said in the same language, "that I am no longer a Heartrender."

He frowned. "That I have not heard."

"It's a long story," she said, switching back to Kerch. It seemed rude to speak in their shared language in front of the others who might not know it. "It's not important."

* * *

"What did he say to you?" asked Inej. She'd insisted that Nina come back to her cabin with her after the tour. It was a lot bigger than the one Nina had been assigned, but of course, it was her ship. A map screen covering one wall showed the Shu system, its moons and planets rendered in false color so that it looked like an oddly-flattened photograph rather than an electronic image. Inej indicated that they should sit on the long curved settee that split the room into working and sleeping areas. It was angled so that they could see both the map screen and the window that looked out on the real stars. 

Nina leaned back against the back cushion, while Inej perched cross-legged. It was a pose that Nina couldn't imagine contorting her own body into, but Inej had an acrobat's flexibility, and she looked perfectly comfortable.

"It's not important," Nina repeated.

Inej cocked her head, considered for a moment. "If it wasn't important he wouldn't have said it. It was about your abilities, wasn't it."

Apparently Inej hadn't left her information-gathering skills behind when she became captain of the _Wraith_. "Yes. He told me he'd heard of my abilities, and I told him I no longer had them."

Inej reached for Nina's hand and gave it a squeeze. "You still have abilities, even if they're not the same ones you had before. And you know I didn't ask you to join us because you're Grisha."

"No, you asked me along for my clever conversation and my stunning good looks."

"That's right," said Inej. "Also the fact that I know I can spend time in a small space with you and not want to kill you." She brushed her knuckles lightly against the back of Nina's hand before withdrawing it. "And it seems the safest thing to do, to have you aboard. After all, the first time I was on a ship with you, you saved my life. I'm counting on you to continue keeping me alive."

After the decoy _Ferolind_ had exploded, and the men from the Black Tips gang had got their hands on Inej, shot her in the side. But Nina no longer had the power to sooth the body and tell it what it needed to do to heal. "I can't. Not any more."

"We have bandages and medicines. You can wrap my injuries and feed me pastries."

Nina laughed. "I didn't know pastries could heal laser burns."

Inej unfolded one leg so she could turn sideways and face her. She put a light hand on Nina's shoulder. "The pastries aren't the important part. Neither are your powers, whether you have them or not. You were a Heartrender, not a Healer."

"I know, I know. I'm surprised you survived me!"

"I wouldn't have survived without you." Her voice was low and steady. "It wasn't the anticoagulant and the bandages and the codeinate you injected me with that saved my life. It was you holding my hand and talking to me, singing those ridiculous songs."

"Anyone could have done that," protested Nina.

"Kaz couldn't."

The words hung in the air between them as though they were made of glass, solid and sharp-edged, a transparent barrier between them. She thought about saying that at least Kaz could sing better than she could, but it didn't seem the right time for a joke. "If he could, he would have," she said carefully. "You know he cares for you as much as he can care about anyone."

" _You_ care for me as much as you can care about anyone. _And_ you can hold my hand." Inej stroked her arm, from shoulder to wrist, then took Nina's hand again. 

Nina felt tears coming to her eyes. "You know, I haven't touched anyone, really, since – since Matthias."

"I know," said Inej. "You lost Matthias, and I never really had Kaz. But," she said, patting Nina's hand, "you've always been there for me, and I will always be there for you. No pressure. If you want, we'll take you to Kerch Station, or to Ravka, or wherever you want to go. If you don't want me, you can have an affair with Mikel, if you like –"

"He's not my type," said Nina. "Too young."

"– or with Kiri, or anyone else on the ship. If you want to stay..." Her fingers twined with Nina's.

Nina leaned forward and kissed Inej on the lips. "I want," she said, "to stay."

* * *

"Grappling beams engaged," said Davin. His fingers flew over the switches and gauges on the board which stretched nearly the full width of the bridge. Beside him, Specht worked the ship's controls and spoke commands into the intercom that connected him with Kiri, down in the engine room. They had dropped out of tide-space into real-space, but she could still nudge the ship with small applications of tide-force, and anyway she was apparently a gifted engineer and knew the regular engines as well as she did the tide-engines.

Or something like that, thought Nina, who was still getting used to the way the _Wraith_ sprang into action, turning itself from a pleasure craft to a battleship between one breath and the next. The ship was like a Barrel tough, sliding up to its quarry with stealth and misdirection, then springing its trap before the mark could call for the _stadwatch_ or reach for a knife. But the next step was the dangerous one; you couldn't lift a man's wallet without slipping your hand into his pocket. And Inej always insisted on leading the boarding party. 

The first ship they boarded, barely out of Fjerdan space, Nina had not been able to tear her gaze from the screen showing the view from Inej's cam as she and three armored crewmen strode through the captured ship. It had all gone quite easily – there were two frightened Suli girls in a locked cabin, who Inej gently soothed and then escorted back to the _Wraith_ – but there were so many ways it could have gone wrong.

After the cargo was offloaded on Shu Epsilon and the girls were left in the care of the port authorities, they spent two days in the dock as Inej hacked into the network there, delicately picking apart coded communications and hidden payments, following the traces of _parem_. The coordinates of an upcoming exchange were extracted from what seemed on the surface to be a mining contract. Kiri pulled them through tide-space to the designated spot, a low orbit around an uninhabited and airless moon, and then held them there, lurking just outside real-space until the _parem_ courier arrived. 

"I should be there," muttered Nina. The cam view showed only the airlock – the boarding party had not yet left the Wraith – but she stared fixedly at it, anxious and tense. 

"You know why you're not," Specht reminded her. 

"Yeah, I know. But I don't like not being able to do anything if something goes wrong."

"It will go as it will go," said Inej's voice over the bridge speaker.

"Whichever Suli sage came up with that proverb must have been drunk." 

A laugh. "And yet it's the truth."

"We're in position, Captain," said Davin.

Specht looked over at Nina and caught her eye. She nodded.

"No mourners," they said in unison.

"No funerals," said Inej. And then she and the rest of the boarding party passed through the airlock and onto the other ship.

* * *

The captain of the courier vessel was a tall, supercilious man who looked and spoke like a Ketterdam mercher. No doubt he was only a hired hand – the tiny supply of _parem_ that had been created before Bo Yul-Bayur's death was controlled by the Shu – but he looked down his nose at Inej as though she were a rat that had managed to crawl aboard. "I told you, we don't have any _jurda parem_. You're welcome to search the ship if you don't believe me." He spread his hands in an exaggerated gesture of affronted honesty. Behind him, Nina could see two men with their arms in the air looking nervously past the cam. Doubtless one of the others in the boarding party was pointing a weapon at them.

"He's lying," said Specht, back on the _Wraith_ 's bridge.

"You're lying," said Inej. "But that's all right. If you don't turn it over to us, we'll blow up your ship." She made the same gesture as he had, her brown hands palm-up in front of her chest. The image on the screen wobbled slightly; the courier vessel apparently had no artificial gravity as the Wraith did. Only the weak pull of the rocky moon was keeping her vertical. "The _parem_ gets destroyed either way. Only in that case, so do you."

"Would she really?" whispered Nina to Specht.

His smile was grim. "Oh, yes."

The courier captain's air of superiority disappeared as he goggled at Inej, eyes wide. "Destroy it? Are you mad?"

"Not particularly," said Inej. "It's just that I'm not a fan of superpowered drug addicts."

"No more am I. But I also don't like seeing millions of kruge going up in smoke."

"So you do have it."

"I didn't say that."

"He does," said Mikel's voice. Mikel, along with Jan and a woman named Sweta, made up the rest of the boarding party. They were not in the view from Inej's cam, so they must have been standing behind her. "There's a hidden compartment between the inner and outer shells on the starboard side behind the head, with a small package inside."

"Fucking Fabrikator," said the captain, and he slapped one hand down against his belt, and then all the demons of hell broke loose. The image on the screen shifted abruptly to the side and then started spinning, and a scream came through the speakers. 

"By the Saints," swore Davin. He punched a few buttons on his console. Immediately the image on the screen splintered into quarters, one for each of the boarding crew's cams. Now the watchers on the bridge had a more complete view, though it was also more confusing. One image showed a panel on the inner skin of the ship with a series of needler nozzles poking through; a booby trap that must have been triggered by the hidden switch on the captain's belt. Another image showed Jan, his face contorted in an agonized grimace – he was the one screaming. She could just see Mikel's hand at the edge of the frame, making passes in the air to coax the needles out of Jan's flesh with his Durast power over the metal shards. A third twisted and spun dizzily, showing crazily-angled views of the captain and the men behind him coming forward, blasters and needlers in their hands.

The fourth showed Inej. The spinning cam was hers, Nina realized; she had launched herself at the captain, ricocheting off the walls of the ship and the control consoles with the precise movements of a low-gravity acrobat. She had knives in her hands, the knives she had lovingly named and always kept close at hand, and they flew from her fingers like hawks diving for their prey. The captain's scream joined Jan's as one knife found its mark in his heart. The two men of the courier's crew scrabbled for weapons, but one was felled by a beam blast and the other dropped to his knees as another of Inej's knives pierced his throat, red droplets of blood slowly trailing in the air.

Suddenly there was a flash of color across all the images except for one, which went completely dark: Inej's cam. The other cams showed a large man pinning her against his chest with one meaty arm, his other hand, fingers as big as Ravkan sausages, splayed across her neck. A deep and unfamiliar voice filled the speakers.

"I will break the neck of your flying girl if you do not leave now. Maybe I will break her neck anyway."

Beside her, Specht swore as Davin's hands hovered impotently over his console. They couldn't attack the courier ship while their people were still aboard. They couldn't leave them to an uncertain fate.

"I can suit up and go over," said Kiri over the intercom.

"No," said Nina. _You still have abilities, even if they're not the same ones you had before._ "Wait."

She reached out across space for the cold awareness that was all that was left of her power – and found nothing. For a moment she almost panicked; then she realized that she was concentrating in the wrong direction, looking toward the screens as though they were windows to what was behind them. But the courier ship was mated to their airlock, below the bridge and to the right, not straight ahead. She closed her eyes, so as better to ignore their false signal, and used her mind only.

And there was that strange tug at her consciousness, the shapes of things that had once been living calling to her, making themselves known to her body and her power. The captain, still in the messy process of dying, seemed a strange swirl of life and death, but the two crewmen were untidy piles of bones and meat, clear to her new senses where everything else was blank. She opened her eyes again to fix in her mind which of the blind spots was the living body of her enemy, and which were her friends, Mikel and Jan and Sweta and Inej. Above all things, Inej.

_I wouldn't have survived without you._

_I'm counting on you to keep me alive._

Nina closed her eyes again, lifted her arms, and _pulled_.

* * *

"To Nina," said Jan, raising a glass in his bandaged hand. "The one-woman zombie apocalypse!"

"Your standards for zombie apocalypses are awfully low," she protested. She hadn't actually seen what had happened, not with her eyes. But Specht had said, awe in his voice, that the two dead courier crewmen had risen from where they had fallen and flown toward the man holding Inej captive. One had crashed into the back of his knees, knocking him down; the other had exploded into a shower of small bones that had driven themselves into the back of his neck like tiny daggers as Inej scrambled free.

"I don't care. You're my favorite zombie apocalypse ever."

"You're my favorite, period," said Inej. She kissed Nina on the cheek and gave her hand a squeeze that promised more, later, when they were alone. "To Nina!"

"To Nina!"

Everyone drank, and grinned, and clapped Nina on the back. Specht gave her a cap embroidered with TS WRAITH across the top, and Mikel gave her a ring that he had fashioned from spare engine parts. The ring had a stylized W on the middle; everyone on the crew had one. "Most tide-ship crews get tattoos, but our fearless leader doesn't care for them, so I made these rings," he said. Nina exchanged a glance with Inej, who held her hand up to show off her own. She'd taken the Menagerie tattoo off Inej's skin, back when she had _parem_ -powered abilities, and she knew Inej's reasons for not wanting permanent marks on her skin, even if they were her own.

But the best gift was from Davin, who led her to his console on the bridge. "This is the airlock control, and this one is the detonation control. Wait until it's clear, please."

"It's just a tiny bomb. You don't have to wait long," Mikel added. 

"Wait until it's clear," said Inej firmly. "It may be a tiny bomb, but it's my ship."

The airlock looked empty, but when she pressed the button that cycled it open, the screen, set to display the view from the cam above the airlock door, showed a tiny package cartwheeling out into space, the ship's lights glinting from the polished metal casing on the explosive charge.

"Hard to believe that tiny thing's worth millions of kruge," Sweta said. "And we're blowing it to bits."

Nina watched as the package spun lazily into the black. The reflections from the metal were getting smaller and dimmer. It would be out of range of the ship's lights soon, invisible, and if it got much farther it would be undetectable as well by any but the most powerful radar – or by a Durast on _jurda parem_. She could almost taste it on her tongue, watching it. It was still not so far that Mikel's ordinary powers, unenhanced by the drug, couldn't draw it back for her – 

"Nina," Inej said gently.

 _I'm a crewmember on the_ Wraith _. I'm Inej's lover. I'm a one-woman zombie apocalypse, and I don't need_ jurda parem _to make me whole._

She pushed the button, and the glinting package vanished.


End file.
